CS 164 2006: Project: Doing Research
Michalis Faloutsos

In this project, you are required to form teams of two,
and take the first steps in doing research.
Research starts with a question, continues
with assessing the state of the art, and arrives at identifying 
what can be done next.
You are expected to pick a research topic and investigate
to the point of being able to make recommendations on:
- its importance and how it fits in with what the
- provide a critical synthesis of previous work
- understand what is left to be done and improved
This is a common "technology assessment" scenario in an industrial
environment (i.e. you may find yourselves doing this after you graduate).

You are expected to:
1) identify a research paper from my web-site
   (I explained the rationale of that in the class)
2) read it and understand it
3) explore more related papers: before or after that paper

Deliverable: We want a report (approx. 4-6 pages, 11pt font, single spaced reasonable margins) that will have the following sections:
1 introduction
2 problem definition
3 review of the main paper
4 review of other related papers
  what previous papers did or did not do
  what subsequent papers did better (or forgot to consider)
5 Discussion
  5.1 what was novel in the main paper
  5.2 what are the weaknesses and limitations of the main paper
  5.3 how could the main paper be improved or extended
      (if the boss would say, read this and find a way that 
       we can improve it: could be using something from the other papers
       or doing more in depth experiments or simulations)
The introduction is a quick summary of the whole paper (approx 1-1.5 pages) that should have approx. a paragraph for each of the subsequent sections.
For more details, see my web-page: on how to structure a research paper:
http://www.cs.ucr.edu/~michalis/techwriting.html